Keep getting the money in good and you"ll be alright in the long run,
Not necessarily. In cash, I"d agree. In tournaments...
Put it this way, you"re in a large tournament, held over several days. You make Day 2 and are sitting pretty with a hefty stack. You"ve played for 15 hours and then you suffer two "beats" - and suddenly you"re in a dangerous situation. Sure enough, an hour or so later you lose a race for all your chips, and you"ve gone. You didn"t put a foot wrong, and yet you"re standing by the rail thinking of what might have been.
If you regularly play in these big tournaments, then you"re going to have the opportunity to get into that position again. But if you did it 20 times, would it be against the laws of probability if you came unstuck each time without cashing big?
I know of very good tournament players who have gone 80-odd tournaments without a cash! That could be down to variance or bad play, or a combination of the two. But you need more good luck acting in your favour to win a tournament than you need bad luck to suffer a beat (or series of beats) that knocks you out.
I once won an APAT tournament. I think I played pretty well that weekend, but I KNOW I was lucky. There are far better tournament players than me in APAT. I could list loads, but two that spring to mind are Eck and Rio. Yet neither of them have won a live national - and if they continued to play for 5 seasons of APAT would we expect them to? Eck did brilliantly to qualify for the WSOP, and then he went on to cash. I know he had some luck along the way, but the fact he"s a good player obviously helped him get into the money. But if he hadn"t cashed, would that have been unexpected? Not really. It"s a massive field, full of all sorts of players. It"s no "failure" not to cash, thousands do it every year - many are very good players.
The idea of "it"ll even out in the long run" doesn"t ring true though. The better players might have an "edge" in a tournament, but their advantage over the other players might only be slight, because of the chance element. There are a lot of bullets to dodge, and maybe a minefield is a better analogy. You have to get from A to B, and the only path is through a minefield. One wrong step and you fail. Obviously in poker you can "earn" yourself several lives so that one wrong step doesn"t end it all. But it"s still the case that hundreds of good steps can all be in vain if you slip up along the way. Getting my analogies all mixed up now.
There"s an article that explains why the luck doesn"t balance itself out, and a major reason for this is that the poorer player often requires luck to win a hand (more than than the better player), and so he"s obviously going to have to outdraw more times than the better player. How is the luck going to "even out" if he doesn"t get the same number of opportunities to outdraw people in the same way?
Good tournament players will be winning players over the long term. However, the ones who have won the big tournaments aren"t necessarily better than the ones who haven"t. Maybe they"ve been luckier.
Also, good luck in the past is obviously not an indication of good luck in the future.
Anyway, what was the question?
